NSA Aftermath in Germany
October 19, 2016
When it was revealed not too long ago that the United States was actively spying on Germany, the country decided it was time to investigate. Netzpolitik wrote an update on Germany’s investigation in “Snowden’s Legacy: Hearing In The Parliament Committee.” The German parliament launched a committee to head the investigation, which included many hearings. At recent hearing in Germany, five USA experts spoke to the committee, including ACLU technologist Charles Soghoian, Watson Institute’s Timothy H. Edgar, ACLU attorney Ashley Gorski, Open Society Foundation senior advisor Morton H. Halperin, and US Access Now policy manager Amie Stepanovich.
The experts met with the committee as a way to ease tensions between the US and Germany, but also share their knowledge about legal issues related to surveillance and individual’s privacy rights. The overall agreement was that current legal framework for handling these issues is outdated and needs to be revamped. There should not be a difference between technical and legal protection when it comes to privacy. As for surveillance and anonymity, there currently is not a legal checks and balances system to rein in intelligence organizations’ power. The bigger problem is not governmental spying, but how the tools are used:
Nevertheless, Christopher Soghoian noted that the real scandal was not that government agencies were spying on their people, but that technology was so poorly secured that it could have been exploited. Historically, encryption and security have had a very low priority for big Internet companies like Google. Snowden turned the discussion upside-down, his disclosures radicalised the very people who design the software the NSA had privately exploited. Therefore, the most important post-Snowden changes were not made in Government hallways but in the technological community, according to Soghoian.
German surveillance technology manufacturers Gamma Group and Trovicor were also mentioned. As the committee was investigating how the NSA violated Germany’s civil rights, of course, a reference was made to the World Wars. What we can pull from this meeting is we need change and technology needs to beef up its security capabilities.
Whitney Grace, October 19, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Palantir Technologies: An Overview of What Looks Like a Muliti Front War
October 18, 2016
I read “Conservatives See Political Reprisal As Obama Administration Sues Peter Thiel’s Palantir.” Here in Harrod’s Creek “political reprisal” gets translated as blood feud. The source for the “reprisal” allegation is a real journalistic outfit, The Washington Times. The story appeared on October 16, 2016, when most of the movers and shakers in DC and other US power centers were gearing up to watch NFL football.
Let’s assume that the information in the write up is rock solid, built on verifiable “factoids”, and objective. This suspension of disbelief is helpful for me; otherwise, I would have some research to do. I prefer to let the article about political reprisal speak for itself.
The hook for the write up is the legal action taken by Palantir Technologies against the US Army. On June 30, 2016, Palantir filed legal documents to air the matter of the US Army’s reluctance to license the Palantir Gotham system instead of the Army’s DCGS or Distributed Common Ground System.
The write up points out that eight weeks after Palantir’s legal eagles dropped their payload on the US Court of Claims, the US Department of Labor pointed out that Palantir was discriminating against Asians. For Federal contractors, discrimination, if proven, is bad news. Loss of contracts and road blocks for future US government work are more than speed bumps for fast growing companies.
The article explains that Palantir perceives that it is not being given a fair shake; specifically:
The US Army “illegally prevented Palantir from bidding” when regulations required the armed service to seek already developed commercial products.
The write up draws a connection between a Palantir founder (Peter Thiel), who supports Donald Trump, and the alleged “political reprisal” by the Department of Labor.
The write up reports that Palantir’s legal eagles:
forced a number of Army intelligence czars to undergo sworn depositions by lawyers from the firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner. While much of their testimony is under seal, some surprising snippets have emerged in follow-up legal motions asking the judge to rule based on the existing record of evidence.
The article asserts that a decision from the court may come as soon as the end of October 2016, which is pretty zippy based on my experience with US government processes.
The article then shifts to a discussion of the multi year, multi billion dollar DCGS system itself. Among the points in the write up I highlighted is this statement from the Washington Times’s write up:
Depositions also show that the Army misled lawmakers when it circulated a white paper on Palantir. The paper said the Army had conducted an extensive evaluation of Palantir when, in fact, it had not. “We did not do any formal evaluation or determination of whether or not the tools could live inside [the common ground system],” an Army official said.
I also noted this comment, which—if on the money—may make some of the big players in the DCGS contracting game nervous:
“This case has the potential to dramatically change not just DCGS as a program, for the better, but also the way the Army goes about contracting commercial solutions already in the marketplace,” said Joe Kasper, Mr. Hunter’s chief of staff. “From the beginning, utilizing Palantir has always been a win-win for the Army and the taxpayer. And if it takes a court decision to make the Army see it, then that’s just the way it is.”
The article then digs into the history of DCGS. The article reveals:
A confidential Army email reveals one reason Palantir never gained favor inside the halls of the Pentagon: Ms. Schnurr hated the system.
Okay, the article pinpoints Lynn Schnurr, once the US Army’s senior information officer, as the source of the burr under the saddle. Ms. Schnurr, the write up says:
appears to have an entrenched animosity towards Palantir, which has been spread and inculcated into the DA staff,” the [an unidentified US Army] officer wrote.
Ms Schnurr has an interesting background. She joined General Dynamics in February 2013. She left her job at the US Army in January 2013 after a 17 year career. She was a 1975 graduate of Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Blacksburg, Virginia) with a BS in education.
Several observations crossed my mind as I thought about this interesting example of “real” journalism:
- The sources for the write up remain a bit fuzzy. That’s not uncommon in some “real” journalism today. I find it annoying to read a reference to an email without a link to that source document.
- The write up laser dots Lynn Schnurr. I find it interesting that an individual is responsible for the behavior of procurement procedures. When I worked at Booz, Allen & Hamilton, it was unusual to find one person who could be identified as the “cause” of a particular event. The bureaucracy works in predictable ways because committees have to do the real work with assorted contractors lending a hand. I am confident that Ms. Schnurr is and was a force with which to be reckoned, but when I bumped into one government project and was hired by a sitting president, I was told: “Not even the president can pay you. Fill out these forms first.”
- Other issues affecting Palantir are not far to seek. The Washington Times did not explore such issues as: [a] Possible resistance to Palantir after the legal dust up about Palantir’s alleged improper use of i2 Group Analyst’s Notebook intellectual property, [b] Palantir’s providing some US Army personnel with access to Gotham without going through the US Army’s often Byzantine procedures, and [c] the clash of the Silicon Valley culture with the Beltway Bandit culture, among others.
If you are following the Palantir US Army legal matter, you will want to read the Washington Times’s article. However, there may be more information germane to the subject than putting Ms. Schnurr in the spotlight. Why identify a person no longer working at the Pentagon as a full time employee as the primum mobile? That triggers me to look for other factors.
In the back of my mind, I continue to consider the consequences of the i2 Group (now owned by IBM, a company with DCGS aspirations). I recall the shock of Sergey Brin’s visit to Washington when he chose to wear sneakers and a T shirt as he called on officials before Google embraced traditional lobbying and revolving doors. I understand the so-called “arrogance” of the start up culture when it encounters individuals who are not as “clued in” to the ins and outs of the Clue Train Railroad. I understand the connection between selling work and following government procedures and protocols.
I surmise that Palantir is facing down a bureaucracy which wants what it wants when it wants it. Outfits which light up the radar screens of numerous individuals in the bureaucracy find themselves burdened with tar balls at every turn. Palantir faces not a singleton issue like the legacy of Ms. Schnurr. Palantir finds itself dealing with the consequences of its actions since the company took CIA – In-Q-Tel funds and received the smiles of a powerful intel outfit.
I have not worked in Washington’s corridors of power for years, but I know that friction can exist between Executive Branch agencies and other US government units. Palantir may be caught of a multi front war here in the USA. Write ups like the one in the Washington Times may only provide a glimpse of a larger, more variegated scene and raise other questions; for example, fund raising, taxes, etc.
Stephen E Arnold, October 18, 2016
Why Verizon Is Just Great
October 18, 2016
I read “Verizon CEO ‘Not That Shocked’ about Yahoo Breach That Exposed 500 Million Users.” I noted two candidates for my Quotes to Note file.
Here’s the first attributed to Lowell McAdam, CEO of Verizon:
“…occasionally they’re [bad actors] going to land a punch. Certainly not anything we wanted to have happen. Certainly we’re going to do everything we can to fortify ourselves.
Here’s the second statement:
we still see a real value to the asset there. But in fairness, we’re still understanding what was going on, to define whether it’s a material impact to the business or not. But the industrial logic of doing this merger still makes a lot of sense.
Yes, industrial logic. Working well for Yahoo.
Stephen E Arnold, October 18, 2016
Google Cloud, Azure, and AWS Differences
October 18, 2016
With so many options for cloud computing, it can be confusing about which one to use for your personal or business files. Three of the most popular cloud computing options are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. Beyond the pricing, the main differences range from what services they offer and what they name them. Site Point did us a favor with its article comparing the different cloud services: “A Side-By-Side Comparison Of AWS, Google Cloud, And Azure.”
Cloud computing has the great benefit of offering flexible price options, but they can often can very intricate based on how much processing power you need, how many virtual servers you deploy, where they are deployed, etc. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud do offer canned solutions along with individual ones.
AWS has the most extensive service array, but they are also the most expensive. It is best to decide how you want to use cloud computing because prices will vary based on the usage and each service does have specializations. All three are good for scalable computing on demand, but Google is less flexible in its offering, although it is easier to understand the pricing. Amazon has the most robust storage options.
When it comes to big data:
This requires very specific technologies and programming models, one of which is MapReduce, which was developed by Google, so maybe it isn’t surprising to see Google walking forward in the big data arena by offering an array of products — such as BigQuery (managed data warehouse for large-scale data analytics), Cloud Dataflow (real-time data processing), Cloud Dataproc (managed Spark and Hadoop), Cloud Datalab (large-scale data exploration, analysis, and visualization), Cloud Pub/Sub (messaging and streaming data), and Genomics (for processing up to petabytes of genomic data). Elastic MapReduce (EMR) and HDInsight are Amazon’s and Azure’s take on big data, respectively.
Without getting too much into the nitty gritty, each of the services have their strengths and weaknesses. If one of the canned solutions do not work for you, read the fine print to learn how cloud computing can help your project.
Whitney Grace, October 18, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Pattern of Life Analysis to Help Decrypt Dark Web Actors
October 18, 2016
Google funded Recorded Future plans to use technologies like natural language processing, social network analysis and temporal pattern analysis to track Dark Web actors. This, in turn, will help security professionals to detect patterns and thwart security breaches well in advance.
An article Decrypting The Dark Web: Patterns Inside Hacker Forum Activity that appeared on DarkReading points out:
Most companies conducting threat intelligence employ experts who navigate the Dark Web and untangle threats. However, it’s possible to perform data analysis without requiring workers to analyze individual messages and posts.
Recorded Future which deploys around 500-700 servers across the globe monitors Dark Web forums to identify and categorize participants based on their language and geography. Using advanced algorithms, it then identifies individuals and their aliases who are involved in various fraudulent activities online. This is a type of automation where AI is deployed rather than relying on human intelligence.
The major flaw in this method is that bad actors do not necessarily use same or even similar aliases or handles across different Dark Web forums. Christopher Ahlberg, CEO of Recorded Future who is leading the project says:
A process called mathematical clustering can address this issue. By observing handle activity over time, researchers can determine if two handles belong to the same person without running into many complications.
Again, researchers and not AI or intelligent algorithms will have to play a crucial role in identifying the bad actors. What’s interesting is to note that Google, which pretty much dominates the information on Open Web is trying to make inroads into Dark Web through many of its fronts. The question is – will it succeed?
Vishal Ingole, October 18, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
HonkinNews for October 18, 2016 Now Available
October 18, 2016
From the wilds of rural Kentucky, Stephen E Arnold highlights the week’s search, online, and content processing news. Two services make it easy to buy a product with a mouse click. Will Amazon’s eCommerce business be threatened by eBay and Pinterest? Plus, this week’s program comments about Google and Pindrop, National Geographic’s new topographic maps, and another of Yahoo’s mounting public relations challenges. The program explains that Google is taking a step toward marginalizing the “regular” Web in favor of the mobile Web. You can view the video shot in eight millimeter film from a cabin in a hollow at this link.
Kenny Toth, October 18, 2016
Yahoo and Email Trick. Trick?
October 17, 2016
I read “Users Accuse Yahoo of Email Trick.” The headline is interesting, but I don’t think of Yahoo as a tricky outfit. I would suggest words along the lines of clumsy, mismanaged, inept, and clueless.
The write up suggests that Yahoo took an action to make it difficult and impractical for a person to move email from Yahoo to another service. Evidence of the cloud of unknowing swathing Yahoo in a purple haze which seems to have wafted over the BBC is this statement:
Yahoo has denied that it has made it deliberately difficult for customers to migrate to another email provider. It follows the disabling of an email-forwarding feature which allows people to migrate automatically. Yahoo said it was a “temporary” move while it worked on improvements.
My view is that Yahoo may be incapable of planning an action. My hunch is that Yahoo’s disorganization and dysfunctional decision making reached a conclusion independent of the Verizon sale, public opinion, thoughts about Yahoo mail users heading for Yandex or some other service.
What’s remarkable is that the BBC write up does not question the actions of Yahoo in a manner less like Lucy picking on Charlie Brown and more like the characters in “Silicon Valley.”
On the other hand, maybe Yahoo is shooting an episode of “Silicon Valley” and following the writers’ directions? That makes more sense than some of the behaviors of Yahoot I have watched in Yahoo’s version of reality TV.
Stephen E Arnold, October 17, 2016
Artificial Intelligence: Time to Surf, Folks
October 17, 2016
I read a remarkable article in Fortune Magazine: “Google Artificial Intelligence Guru Says AI Won’t Kill Jobs.” I had a Dilbert moment mixed with a glimpse of bizarro world.
The main point of the write up is that smart software is the next big thing. Unlike other big things such as outsourcing work from the US to other countries with lower cost labor, work will not be “killed.” Strong word.
I highlighted this statement from the prognosticating write up:
humanity is still “many decades away from encountering that sort of labor replacement at scale.” Instead, the technology is best used to help humans with work-related tasks rather than replace them outright.
Sounds great. Zooming to the subject of Google, the write up reported:
Google has “developed techniques to safely deploy these systems in a controllable way,” countering fears that A.I. systems are left to run on their own accord.
I assume that’s the reason a consortium of folks are going to gather together to figure out how to make artificial intelligence work just right.
I spoke with a person who drives a truck for a living. He was interested in robot driven trucks. He said, “There won’t be much demand for guys like me, right?”
I reassured him. The truth is that “guys like him” are definitely going to lose their jobs. The same full time equivalent compression will operate in law firms, health care delivery, and dozens of other areas where labor is one or the if not the biggest expense. Leasing a system able to work without taking vacations, calling in sick, or demanding a pension will be embraced. Cost control, not work for humans, is the driving factor.
Online may benefit. Think of those folks who lose their jobs and the free time they have. These people will be able to surf the Web, talk to Alexa, and binge watch.
Informationization (a word I first heard in the early 1990s at a conference in Japan) means disruption. Work processes will change. There will be more online consumers. I am not sure what these folks will do for a living.
Unlike the individuals who work in certain types of companies, the guys like the trucker, the legal researcher, the librarian, etc. are going to have plenty of time to be social on Facebook.
Fortune Magazine seems to buy into the baloney that “A.I. will help humans with their jobs, not replace them.” How’s that working out in traditional publishing?
Stephen E Arnold, October 17, 2016
Artificial Intelligence Is Only a Download Away
October 17, 2016
Artificial intelligence still remains a thing of imagination in most people’s minds, because we do not understand how much it actually impacts our daily lives. If you use a smartphone of any kind, it is programmed with software, apps, and a digital assistant teeming with artificial intelligence. We are just so used to thinking that AI is the product of robots that we are unaware our phones, tablets, and other mobiles devices are little robots of their own.
Artificial intelligence programming and development is also on the daily task list on many software technicians. If you happen to have any technical background, you might be interested to know that there are many open source options to begin experimenting with artificial intelligence. Datamation rounded up the “15 Top Open Source Artificial Intelligence Tools” and these might be the next tool you use to complete your machine learning project. The article shares that:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the hottest areas of technology research. Companies like IBM, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon are investing heavily in their own R&D, as well as buying up startups that have made progress in areas like machine learning, neural networks, natural language and image processing. Given the level of interest, it should come as no surprise that a recent artificial intelligence report from experts at Stanford University concluded that ‘increasingly useful applications of AI, with potentially profound positive impacts on our society and economy are likely to emerge between now and 2030.
The statement reiterates what I already wrote. The list runs down open source tools, including PredictionIO, Oryx 2, OpenNN, MLib, Mahout, H20, Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit, Deeplearning4j, CNTK, Caffe, SystemML, TensorFlow, and Torch. The use of each tool is described and most of them rely on some sort of Apache software. Perhaps your own artificial intelligence project can contribute to further development of these open source tools.
Whitney Grace, October 17, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Demand for British Passports Surge on Dark Web Post Brexit
October 17, 2016
A Freedom of Information Act request submitted by British general insurer Esure reveals that 270,000 British passports have been reported missing so far in 2016. A tiny percentage of these passports are for sale on Dark Web for a premium.
In an article by Jennifer Baker titled Dark Web awash with pricey British passports after UK vote for Brexitstates:
The value of a fake British passport has increased by six percent since the vote in favor of Brexit, and is predicted to rise further if rules on European Union freedom of movement change
Each passport is being sold for around $3,360 and upwards in Bitcoin or its equivalent. Restriction of movement across borders from the European Union to the United Kingdom is considered to be the primary reason for the surge in demand for British passports.
While the asking price for smaller EU nation passports remains tepid on Dark Web, experts are warning that instances of British passport thefts will increase by 20 percent next year.
The offline and online black market for British passports is estimated to be around $57 million a year. According to Ms Baker:
The most common hotspots for passport theft included bars and restaurants (14 percent), the beach (14 percent), busy streets (14 percent) and hotel rooms (13 percent). However, it isn’t just overseas as one in five (19 percent) of people reported a passport being stolen from their own homes.
A stolen passport can be used without any hassles till it is reported lost or stolen, and Brexit rules come into force. Even after being reported, the passport can still be used for identity theft and other online scams. Can there be a better way to curb this practice of identity theft, Brexit or not?
Vishal Ingole, October 17, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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